Microstructure and fatigue damage mechanism of 6082-T6 aluminium alloy welded joint

Abstract

In this paper, 6mm thick 6082-T6 high-strength aluminium alloy is taken as the research object, and CLOOS ROMAT-3500 industrial robot MIG welder is used for welding. High-cycle fatigue test is carried out on welded joint and 6082-T6 base metal. Microstructure, microhardness, tensile properties and fatigue properties are studied, and fatigue fracture is observed and analyzed. The test results show that: equiaxed crystals exist in the center of the weld. Broken equiaxed crystals are found in the weld due to stirring in the molten pool, a large number of pore and columnar crystal layers are found at the junction of the two beads. A small amount of pore and cellular dendrite are found in the fusion zone. A softening zone with a minimum hardness of 65.5HV exists in the heat affected zone(HAZ). The conditional fatigue limits for base metal and weld specimens are 77.26MPa and 48.69MPa at the set target cycle of 107 respectively. In fatigue fracture, there are a lot of cleavage fracture characteristics and ductile fracture characteristics. The crack initiation is quasi-cleavage fracture characteristic. In the past studies, I have studied the fatigue life of joints, but as the research progresses, I believe that the fatigue behavior and fatigue damage mechanism plays an important role in fatigue life. In this paper, Fatigue fracture process is analyzed by correlation calculation of stress intensity factor. Two crack initiation modes are proposed based on the welding process. The first is fatigue crack initiation caused by stress concentration at the grain boundary where hydrogen elements converged, the second is fatigue crack initiation caused by the gap between equiaxed and columnar crystals inside and outside the central pore of the weld.